Claire-Louise Bennett. Photo: Conor Horgan At Vulture, Reeves Wiedeman lays out everything he and Lila Shapiro have uncovered about the scammer who has spent years impersonating publishing industry professionals over email in order to get early copies of book manuscripts. Wiedeman and Shapiro have gathered a lot of information—the thief’s “favorite emoticon was ;)”—but the culprit’s motives remain inscrutable. “Was the pointlessness the point?” Wiedeman wonders. “The one thing that seemed to tie all these tiny acts of deception together was a sense that the thief was in it for the pleasure of the act itself. Whoever they were—a

Janice Mirikitani, 1977. Photo: Nancy Wong. Poet Janice Mirikitani, a former Poet Laureate of San Francisco and cofounder of the social-service nonprofit Glide, has died at the age of eighty. When she was a child, Mirikitani spent time in a US internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The author of multiple poetry collection, Mirikitani also edited anthologies, and coauthored a nonfiction book about her work with Glide. San Francisco mayor London Breed remembered Mirikitani as “one of our city’s true lights. . . . She was a visionary, a revolutionary artist and the very

Leslie Jamison. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan Early in his governorship, Andrew Cuomo invited Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson and author of The Power Broker, to the state capitol to talk about Robert Moses. As it turned out, Cuomo did most of the talking, sharing his admiration of Moses and regaling the author with his plans to “build big,” Shane Goldmacher writes in the New York Times. The governor then declared the meeting over. “It was an arrogant and angering thing to do,” Mr. Caro recalled in an interview. “To think I had given a day of my life

Kate Aronoff. Photo: Bold Type Books For this week’s Jewish Currents newsletter, David Klion talks with New Republic climate writer Kate Aronoff about the new IPCC report, and how major news outlets’ despairing coverage of its contents—while understandable—misses the “full picture” and can contribute to dangerous messaging. Aronoff outlines specific inaccuracies in such coverage and elaborates: “The reality, according to the IPCC, is that every 10th of a degree [of global warming] translates to tens of thousands of lives lost, so every little incremental step we can take to mitigate climate change matters a tremendous amount. There’s no point

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Photo: Kayla Holdread. Dolly Parton has announced that she’s writing a novel with James Patterson. Parton’s fiction debut is titled Run Rose Run and will have a companion album based on the characters and plot of the book. The New York Times is releasing a series of subscriber-only newsletters by authors including Tressie McMillan Cottom, John McWhorter, Kara Swisher, and more. According to Axios, at least eighteen Times newsletters will be for subscribers only beginning next week. At Guernica, an interview with the former United States poet laureate, Rita Dove. The author’s new poetry

Percival Everett, 2011 Online at Booth, the publication run by students and faculty of the Butler University MFA program, Brian Rocha interviews Percival Everett, the author, most recently, of the novel Telephone. They discuss Everett’s respect for place in fiction, returning to works of art to find them changed, and the publishing industry’s obsession with marketing. “The problem really is that the publishing industry is now purely marketing. It was at one point literary,” Everett says. “To me this is about art, not about racial equity in publishing. If it were all about art, a lot of those things

Vauhini Vara For The Believer, Vauhini Vara has an essay about how AI technology—specifically a model called GPT-3—helped her grieve the death of her sister: “I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them. One night, when my husband was asleep, I asked for its help in telling a true story.” At the New York Times, William J. Broad writes about Charles H. Loeb, a Black journalist who covered the atomic bomb strike on Hiroshima. Loeb’s investigations led him to

Adrian Tomine. Illustration by Adrian Tomine Adrian Tomine’s graphic memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is being adapted into an animated television series. Tomine, who is also known for his comic Optic Nerve and his graphic story collection Killing Dying, will write the screenplay. The Dipp is keeping tabs on what books are serving as props on the new HBO series White Lotus: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and more . .

Mario Levrero. Photo: © Eduardo Abel Gimenez “How do you tell a story about a relationship that remains, at heart, stable and that has no endpoint toward which to go?” For Lapham’s Quarterly, B. D. McClay considers the friendship plot: “In both children’s literature and in stories for adults, friendship repeatedly emerges as something oppressively close, exclusive of others, jealous of growth; friendship stories are about rifts and endings, drawing a final curtain over the lost past.” The Believer has published an English translation of an interview with the late Uruguayan bookseller, author, and cartoonist Mario Levrero, in which

Danzy Senna. Photo: © Anne Fishbein For The Atlantic, Danzy Senna writes about Courtney E. Martin’s memoir Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School and Robin DiAngelo’s Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, taking the two books as emblematic of a new genre, what she terms “anti-racist self-help.” Senna notices that both books are intent on demonstrating the goodness and effortful striving of their authors: “The word brave gets used a lot in Martin’s book, and the idea of bravery gets performed a lot in DiAngelo’s book, as she time

Nell Zink. Photo: Francesca Torricelli Nell Zink, the author, most recently, of Doxology, has sold a new novel to Knopf. Avalon is “a Cinderella story framed as a confession, complete with a dusty money laundering operation, outlaw bikers, and a handsome prince with cerebral machinations.” In The Nation, Marie Solis reviews Kikuko Tsumura’s novel There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job and the ways in which fiction depicts our working lives. Comparing the book to recent stories about work by Halle Butler, Hilary Leichter, and Ottessa Moshfegh, Solis notes Tsumura’s approach: “This is what jobs are about, good

Join Bookforum tonight at 7pm EDT for the first episode of our new video series, No Wrong Answers. Anuk Arudpragasam will talk about his Booker Prize–longlisted novel A Passage North with Megha Majumdar, whose own novel, A Burning, was a New York Times notable novel and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The event is free and will be streamed via Zoom. You can RSVP here. PEN America has posted videos from its 2021 World Voices Festival. The twenty-five videos include panels and conversations about literature with writers including George Saunders, Matthew Salesses, and Rivka Galchen on teaching

Tracy O’Neill Drawing on Carole Angier’s forthcoming biography, The Guardian’s Donna Ferguson speculates on what inspired Sebald to write novels “saturated with despair,” the lasting trauma of the holocaust, and suicide. Novels such as The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, Angier suggests, became Sebald’s means of grappling with his authoritarian father, a German soldier who fought in World War II. The realization that his father fought in Hitler’s army, and that his parents had benefited from the Nazis, caused Sebald long periods of depression, even breakdowns. Angier suggests that one particular breakdown was pivotal in his writing career: “It

Kenzaburō Ōe. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Hpschaefer The New Yorker Union, along with the unions of Pitchfork and Ars Technica, have agreed to ratify a new contract. The unions operated through the NewsGuild of New York and negotiated with Conde Nast management for more than two years. The new agreement includes substantial victories for the unions, including wage increases, a salary floor, a diversity committee, and a ban on nondisclosure agreements, among other provisions. Nieman Lab reports on a new guide from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma advising journalists on how to write about traumatic events. As Joshua Benton writes,

Torrey Peters. Photo: Natasha Gornik Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby, has four novellas coming out from Random House next year. Two of the books, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker, had been published online while the others are from unpublished manuscripts. Peters tweeted that Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones has also been optioned for film and television with “a director I think you will approve of.” The new Gawker.com has launched. In a letter from the editor, Leah Finnegan writes, “I ask you to approach this new iteration of Gawker with an open mind

Lauren Michele Jackson. Photo: Jorge I. Cotte For the New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson writes about the history of—and current campaigns against—critical race theory. Conservatives such as Christopher Rufo have gone out of their way to make critical race theory a right-wing target. Rufo “explained that he’d gone truffle-hunting for incendiary ideas in the works of scholars such as Bell, Crenshaw, and Angela Davis, whose names he had found in the footnotes of anti-racism best-sellers.” Meanwhile, Jackson writes, liberals hoping to combat conservatives such as Rufo have “worked themselves into a corner: in attempting to defend critical race theory,

Anuk Arudpragasam. Photo: Halik Azeez For the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz writes about the podcasts that have emerged in the wake of Chapo Trap House’s “near-monopoly on socialist podcasting,” with a focus on Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell’s Know Your Enemy. “Sitman and Adler-Bell are serious,” Marantz writes, “about the ‘know’ part of their title. They seem more ambivalent about the ‘enemy’ part. It’s not that they’re squishy about their politics: they have discussed at length what their socialist utopia would look like, and their only sustained disagreement during the 2020 primaries came in the form of Sitman, a

Emily St. John Mandel. Photo: Sarah Shatz Hilton Als considers the sui generis style and voice of Renata Adler’s novel Speedboat. “I don’t know of any journalist who’s had the pleasure of reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat and not dreamt of writing a book ‘just’ like it,” Als writes. “And that’s because the author’s brilliant stop and start 1976 novel about a female reporter living in an unnamed city glistens with authenticity, not only when it comes to her protagonist Jen Fain’s career as a journalist, but all the existential stuff that fucks your head up as you go about

Colson Whitehead. Photo: Chris Close In The Atlantic, Wright Thompson writes about what we still don’t know about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder. Thompson visits the barn in Drew, Mississippi where the fourteen-year-old was brought by a group of white men, and where he died. Many accounts leave the barn out of Till’s story. Today, the barn sits on a local dentist’s property, where Till’s family can visit. “The barn’s existence,” Thompson writes, “conjures a complex set of reactions: It is a mourning bench for Black Americans, an unwelcome mirror for white Americans. It both repels and demands attention.” “The

Fernando Pessoa. For the New York Times, Benjamin Moser reviews Richard Zenith’s new biography of the enigmatic Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Best known for The Book of Disquiet, a fictional diary of fragmentary observation that was discovered and published after his death, Pessoa was an office worker who wrote under a range of names. As Moser observes, “He was a whole galaxy of writers—heteronyms, as he called them, with entirely different personalities and different, often radically conflicting, views on poetry, style, nature, politics and the antique.” In the London Review of Books, Gary Younge reviews We Own This City: